Website Traffic Series Part 9 – Buying Targeted Traffic

By Daniel Scocco - 1 minute read

As you know the intent of this series is to cover all tactics and techniques to generate traffic to a website, so we will touch both free and paid methods. Today I want to talk about a paid one, the so called targeted traffic deals.

The Concept: Do a quick search on Google for “buy traffic” or “targeted traffic” and you will see an immense number of sponsored results. Those are basically websites that sell targeted traffic (or so they claim, but read on).

The amount of traffic and cost vary. Here are some examples that I gathered: “250,000 real visitors for $69,” “10,000 targeted visitors for $39,” and “10,000 visitors for $9,99.”

As you can see they have solutions for all pocket sizes…

Basically, therefore, these websites will send you traffic in exchange for money.

Does is Work?: Hardly. The trick of this business is that they make the impression that they will send real Internet visitors to your website, but most of the times the traffic will come from popups, popdowns, traffic exchange and get-paid-to-surf schemes. Here are some disclaimers that I collected from those websites:

“Client understands that HIT COUNTERS on your site DO NOT ACCURATELY REPRESENT THE NUMBER OF VISITORS SENT TO YOUR SITE.”

“The client understands that if the visitor viewing the the ad closes it before it finishes loading (due to network bandwidth, high impact graphics, animation or lack of interest on the visitors part etc.), IT WILL COUNT AS AN AD VIEW ON OUR SYSTEM, WE HAVE SENT YOUR SITE TO THE VISITOR AND HAVE THEREFORE FULFILLED OUR OBLIGATION.”

I also found it interesting that most of those websites have an identical Terms of Service. Either they are copying from each other, or someone owns them all.

How to get started: Don’t. I have considered purchasing those services in the past, but they always sounded too good to be true. Guess what, probably they are.

The techniques and methods used to delivered the “targeted” traffic are so cheap that the overall results should be close to zero.

One of those days I will take one shot for the team and order some “10,000 real visitors” to see what traffic I will be able to track from Google Analytics.

Until them I would not recommend anyone to spend money on such schemes, unless it is done for scientific purposes…

Over to the readers: Have you ever purchased one of those target traffic offers? Did it work? Do you think some of them could be legitimate?

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I think the effectiveness of the traffic you purchase is dependent on your expectations. You can’t expect to pay $12 and get rich with conversions. As you know, there are so many factors including the landing page, the offer, etc. If you want to buy traffic for your website, its a good idea, but be sure to consider how the category of your traffic to be sure the pop-ups or pop-unders are going to the right audience who is interested in what you are selling.

Fraseron October 31, 2009 1:10 pm

Hi I bought 10000 real visitors to split between a couple of sites I have and I doubt any of it was real or were paid to click in and out,
I was able to watch the viewers in real time as they came in and it was a lot of nonsense.

I set up targeted pages to land on with an insane free offer for each page, each offer had about 30 visits every couple of minutes and within 2 seconds of arriving were in checkout, login, shipping info and out without even reading the offer.

I have the software to view their movements through my site in realtime and the whole thing was a joke (google bots spent longer lol) if I had checked the stats using standard hostgator tools it probably would have looked impressive. So net result a waste of $12.

At least I know my site can handle 3000 visitors in a couple of hours.

So back to the drawing board to find some other get rich waste of money scheme NOT!!

Elandre Potgieteron October 11, 2009 4:21 pm

I admit I have used some of these and indeed a waste of money. Rather go the organic route. I use Blogclicker.com to get some extra traffic to my site. Also not a big boost but it helps. There are a lot of scammers out there… and at least Blogclicker seems to be okay. This is the only one I will pay for to get some extra traffic. I am talking maybe 50 visits per day from them. The other I have used are all free traffic exchanges which also dont bring in all that much. I want to start using Facebook Ads, still deciding. Thanks